At the beginning of March Argenta were informed that our application (in collaboration with Cyth Systems) was successful for a Transport Research and Innovation Grant (TRIG) from the Connected Places Catapult. This caused all manner of excitement for a number of reasons!
Firstly, winning funding is hard, as the competition to access it is so fierce. It has been Argenta’s focus to get into rail (doing the Get into Rail programme with the @BCRRE was the first step!), so to have some funding will be a great leg up to enable this. The project is research and development, which is the most interesting area to be working in. Cutting edge, the potential to change the way things are done for the better and have a wider impact on the industry and in this case the environment. And finally, trains are cool!
The funding will be used for the development of a prototype solution to support the digitalisation of the rail freight industry. The freight wagons need a more effective solution for data acquisition and intelligent analysis. Argenta’s idea aims to enable more extensive data acquisition and analysis. This could include load balancing, making sure whatever the wagon is carrying is distributed evenly through the wagon. It could be predictive maintenance using vibration analysis. They are hoping the possibilities become exponentially wider.
